While promoting the US DVD and Blu-Ray release of SCREAM 4, director Wes Craven has been discussing the possibility of further instalments in the SCREAM franchise. Mixed reviews and disappointment at the box office of the most recent sequel means SCREAM 5 has yet to be green-lit, despite the Weinstein Company previously stating we will be seeing Ghostface again.
‘Bob [Weinstein] doesn’t typically call until there’s something down on paper or something a writer can pitch to me, so I don’t expect to hear anything until Bob has that,’ the filmmaker told Shock Til You Drop.
Speaking to MovieWeb, he stated, ‘The odds are that there will be a SCREAM 5. Whether I will be a part of it or not? I don’t know. My contract gives me the first look. If they show me something that is really wonderful? Of course I will be a part of it.’
Craven seems confident about a follow-up and has commented in the past about SCREAM 4 paving the way for a new trilogy.
‘Most people think that I sit around and think up ideas. Then I send them to the studio. With Scream, that is not the case. Kevin Williamson has been the writer since day one. He has been the writer on all of these projects, at least at the beginning of them. That relationship with him and Bob Weinstein is very old, and close. Typically what will happen is that Bob Weinstein or Kevin Williamson will come up with a new idea, and they will pitch it to one or the other. If they both like it, they will toss it around and see if they can develop it into an overarching concept. Then I get the telephone call. They say, “We have something to show you.” It will either be a scene, or if it is Kevin Williamson, he will run through the idea with me from beginning to end. That is what happened on this one. There were a few pages. Not many. At some point there was a first draft. But it mainly started with me and Kevin Williamson sitting down in a restaurant in Los Angeles. He showed me how it would go, and I really thought he had something there. So I signed on. Before that point, I am at a position where I don’t want to be involved with something until the script is there. That makes me not a part of the original process, of banging out the idea. I think that Kevin Williamson is the best at that. And Bob Weinstein is all over that too. I don’t want to play another guy in that. Going into [SCREAM 4], the first meeting I had with Kevin Williamson, he did sketch out a SCREAM 5 and 6. The idea was that we were doing the first in a new trilogy. We had to wait to see if we made enough money on each film to make the next one viable. If that happens, those two will come up with the concepts and an idea that is worth fulfilling.’
Personally, I loved SCREAM 4. Despite being the third sequel, it felt like a direct follow-up to the 1996 original (meaning we can pretend SCREAM 3 never happened) and successfully upped the comedy, violence, and use of modern technology to create something fun, fresh, and at rare moments, scary. Craven seems to believe there’s still life in the slasher franchise yet — and really, who’s even talking about Wes Craven when he isn’t working on SCREAM? — so I’d put my money on the director helming another sequel within the next few years.
